The Led Zeppelin Plagiarism Compendium

I'd like to know how many albums Zeppelin sold last year. I bet it's a significant one. The plagiarism issue is still a valid one, though maybe alleviated a little bit by the fact the writers of the songs are getting a cut. Except for the poor Dazed and Confused guy. And Page did a flat out note for note rip of that song, if I remember correctly.

many xps yeah that's what drives me crazy--it's not that plagiarism "doesn't matter," it's that everyone knows this and knew it 20 years ago, the impacted parties are all dead, and yet the opening post of this thread is like some smoking gun shit that is suddenly supposed to do....what? how is this information supposed to impact me?

the solo in "Rock 'n roll" is so sloppy that I gave up trying to learn it cuz I can't make out half of it. but uhm are we really talking about sloppiness as a detractor in blues-based rock 'n roll, cuz if so there's a lot of bands that will need to snap their guitar cases shut.

My problem with Zeppelin (besides Robert Plant’s voice) is not so much that they borrowed or stole songs, but that they didn’t even bother to acknowledge those artists who helped shape their sound. The Rolling Stones once refused to appear on a TV show unless Howlin’ Wolf was given a spot, too. In the folk or blues tradition, it’s quite common to “borrow” themes, melodies, etc. — Dylan’s been doing it his whole career. But the guy has always trumpeted his admiration for those who influenced him, naming names in countless interviews for nearly 50 years now. He helped bring a lot of his musical heroes to the public eye and, yes, increase their record sales (whether they actually saw a dime of the profits or not).LZ basically said: “This is our song. Fuck you.”

Hey, I think they were an awesome-sounding group (again, except for Plant, whose shrieking is more painful to my ears than nails on a chalkboard). But they managed to distinguish themselves as being even bigger twats than nearly every other multiplatinum-selling band. That takes some doing.

Led Zeppelin is just ripped off blues, in fact their music is exactly the same as Blind Willie Johnson. In fact if people weren't so racist you could have put Blind Willie Johnson in front of an arena and it would have had the same effect on the audience as Led Zeppelin because Led Zeppelin did not actually bring anything to the music.

I said this on some other thread but one of the things that I think gets overstated is that while Zep borrowed/stole liberally (I don't think there's anything at all wrong with this, fwiw) they're stuff rarely actually SOUNDS like the original. the production/arrangement/performance of material was a central aspect of Zeppelin, and claiming that, for example, they're version of Nobody's Fault But Mine bears anything more than a passing resemblance to Bukka's stripped-down, lo-fi original is just ridiculous.

i'm kind of torn between thinking copyright laws should allow significantly more reuse and thinking that it's shitty to not give credit to artists you're borrowing from. complicated also by the historical power inequities that are at play when white artists steal from black artists.

what's the copyright situation in jamaica? listening to a lot of reggae recently and thinking about such a remix-heavy culture, with "version upon version" of tunes i can only imagine were not created w/ permission from copyright holders, if there were even clear owners to begin with